tuerca

Spanish

According to the Coromines dictionary, probably a variation of older puerca (literally "female pig"), from Latin porca, with a /t/ from tornillo (“bolt, screw”). The shift in meaning happened through comparison of bolts and nuts with pig's penises and female pigs, respectively. Compare other remodelings based on antonyms: Latin sinexter, Latin grevis, Latin rendere. Compare similar semantic shifts in old and dialectal Italian porchetta, Old French escroue (whence French écrou, English screw), Dutch schroef, German Schraube (both borrowed from some form of Latin scrofa), Navarro-Lapurdian aardi, ahardi and ardie ("nut" on a screw, but also "screw" and finally a wooden device with an adaptable hole on the center designed for the press), Aragonese troyeta ("tuerca o rosca de la prensa de vino" (please help translate)) (diminutive of trueya "female pig", cognate with Catalan truja, French truie, Italian troia). The original /p/ survives in Portuguese porca (“nut”), from Old Galician-Portuguese porca. The Mexican "penis" sense is a minced oath of verga.

tuerca f (plural tuercas)